You're looking at an impulse generator at the National Grid High Voltage Laboratory at the University of Manchester.

No, it's not a part of a Star Trek spaceship, but it does something pretty cool: it lets researchers study how materials react to lightning.

Ian Cotton, a senior lecturer at the University of Manchester's School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, says: "We do a lot of lightning protection work here."

Electricity is taken straight from the mains, at the UK's standard 240 volts, but a towering impulse generator then ramps it up to a massive two million volts - creating a voltage that can be used to see how lightning attaches to objects.